Developing the speech and language skills of teenagers with Down syndrome

Abstract

This paper reports on the outcomes of a project designed to evaluate the effectiveness of language teaching for teenagers. The aim was to improve the structure of the language used by the teenagers with Down's syndrome. Twelve teenagers took part in the study, which involved them in a variety of experimental and practical teaching activities over the period of a year. All the teenagers benefited from the intervention, though there were large individual differences in how much and why they benefited. Teaching which capitalised on the visual perceptual and visual memory strengths of these teenagers, by making use of reading, was the most effective. A key reason for delay in language development appears to be limited auditory short-term memory span.